Session Abstract: Edge is joined by Ryan Darby to discuss how Office 365 is Microsoft's fastest-growing commercial product ever and is now the number one deployed application in the enterprise. It is the company's most profitable business and productivity product. but how does this translates into productivity for business users and project delivery.​​

Session Abstract: In this session Edge is joined by Sonia Cuff MVP and Paul Woods.

End-users often see technology from a very personal point of view. While IT is likely focused with the mechanics and logistics, your clients, the users are scratching their heads thinking "what's the real benefit here?". Cue for the adoption strategy. With Office 365 becoming so pervasive in our business, adoption is now a key consideration in any rollout. Let's discuss the challenges, the goals and risks of this fascinating topic.​​

Session Abstract: Most companies that go to the cloud do so because they need business agility and cost savings. But how can you know if you're getting all the benefits? Or worse, what are you missing? Let's separate fact from fiction and bust these 10 myths about moving your projects to the cloud.​

Session Abstract: A city-planet, Coruscant is the vibrant heart and capital of the galaxy, home of the Jedi. Let's have a look how they use Project Online to manage government projects. From citizen's ideas list to final infrastructure delivery.​

If your team have Office 365 and use Skype for Business you will love Microsoft Teams! I love Teams, my team love Teams, my customers love Teams…there is only a problem: my customers and my team cannot use Teams in the same project. Sad face!

Microsoft actually promised this when they launched Teams…you know… that you could invite external folks to your conversation. That promise never eventuated…Until now. Happy Face!

Guest Access for Microsoft Teams

In June 2017, a few lucky folks started to use guest access in Teams, but then somehow Microsoft went silent on it. Maybe they are doing a closed POC, I thought. So I asked around and actually that’s the case, they have a group of people testing this feature.

If only I had this for my projects I would be a happy chap ….

Microsoft Teams, please I want to be loved!!

Public Access, Anytime, Anywhere, Everywhere, for All Your Team Mates!!

And the best part I noticed: This test is not only internal. The people testing guest access are actual Office 365 people in the wild! It means, yeah you too can soon give it a try.

Anyone keen to invite me to pilot-test it this feature

Why Guest Access Matters?

This is an massive step forward for Teams as many people often work with 3rd parties. I lost count of how many times I went to my customers and thought about it: “oh man, if only I could bring you guys to our common Teams umbrella…oh well, we’ll have to use Groups with External Access”

Guest access matters because without it Teams is a cut-down version of Slack…and we want Teams to be ABOVE Slack…To make it AWESOME!!

Are you part of this Microsoft Teams Guest Access trial? Let me know! I want to have a chat with you!!

Another day, another big data leak. Do you have a minute? Let's talk a bit about basic security and how even the “big guys” can have it wrong.

Since you're a young IT professional you hear the mantra that login credentials (username, password etc) should never be shared nor written in plain-text(Hello, TickeTek!!). So, why do we keep seeing these things in workplaces? Passwords for network shared on stick notes, handwritten in walls, displayed in big monitors for the sake of convenience…

The answer is: Unfortunately, this is quite a common practice and worst coming from bad decision making.

The Weakness Stand

Even considering that most of the companies have an off-boarding process for contractors, it can take up to a week to completely sanitize access rights and passwords to all the sensitive data once handled by those individuals. One week is enough time for anyone with ill intentions to go back and hack into systems. And that isn't a rare incident.

Privileged Accounts: Free as in Free Beer

It gets worse. The report revealed that privileged accounts for systems, and network devices are being shared without any policies to protect them. 40% of U.K. IT leaders working for big companies (over 500 employees) said more than 10% of their staff have privileged access to data in some form.

This number jumps to 50% for small and mid-sized companies (less than 500 employees). Too many people with too much, unnecessary, power in their hands. We are talking about confidential and highly sensitive information kind of access. Rightly so, 62% of U.S. IT leaders believe their companies have too many privileged users. Look at this: Security Auditors guess Australian government database passwords on first attempt!That’s shocking!

Cultural Differences?

Now one thing to consider. This report was done with 200 companies in the USA and 200 in the UK. One might think that a more liberal economy would pose a bigger risk to IT security systems. Truth is, it does not. The overall pattern is consistent across all groups in both countries. For example, around 50% percent of all companies involved in the study confirmed that their companies had a data breach. And the bad guys are there for the taking like sharks.

A Backup Always Work, The Restore Is What Fails

Almost all companies have some sort of identity keys in place but nearly half of them have monitoring, auditing or privileged identity management in place. Quite surprising, 1/3 of these companies don't have trained employees to respond to a data breach or how the accounts are used. They are simply given to folks and trusted they will do good with them. No wonder so many breaches happens.

The Disaster is a Decision

Often times we hear that a disaster is a series of small events that lead to a big event. It is very surprising that experienced senior managers and leaders on this day and age are still following bad decision making frameworks, yet admitting they do need to do a better job with their data. The quote "When a data leak happens, it is probably your fault" is becoming more alive than ever.

Once again I got confirmed as a speaker for the Collab365 Conference. This is one of the coolest conferences around from the people organizing it to the folks participating online. A single session can easily reach thousands of people, so you can imagine my excitement. And as a plus, it is always great being at Microsoft HQ in Redmond. Also a good time to reconnect with folks from the Office 365 team in their offices. (*cough*also visit the Microsoft store*cough*)

My session is as usual around Office 365 Compliance and Data Protection and it is called: "Office 365 eDiscovery: DLP for your Business and Your Data".

Join the Collab365 Summit and watch the sessions, there is an incredible amount of brilliant minds and souls behind this event, doing this for the community at large.

Today I've got a call from a very worried customer: "Help, our Project Online Administrator got locked out! What do we do???"

First, let's bring calm into the conversation. You know people will live after that. If your Project Administrator got locked don't panic, the site collection administrator automatically has administrative privileges. So to fix it quickly, ask the tenant or SharePoint online admin to fix this for you and assign you or someone as site collection admin and then you can go and fix the Project Admin. Done!

Now let’s talk about the B-side.

First, How Did you Get Into this Situation?

I know, soul searching is not easy. If you know what caused the issue, great otherwise you should start asking questions. That's a very important first step to understand what happened. Generally think about the last steps performed in the site. Look for things like:

Any changes happened to the Administrators in Project Server or in the Administrators from Active Directory

Any synchronization happened to the AD group in the Resource Center. Maybe this happened and your Admin became inactive.

Any bulk password changes happened in your organization

Any user migration recently happened in your organization

You know, things like this to give you a sense of what caused the issue.

So well done! You fixed the problem and you understood what happened.

Let's Learn from this Event…

Let's lay the basics out here. Your company's Office 365 tenant have:

A global administrator,

A SharePoint administrator,

A site collection administrator,

A Project Online administrator.

Experience tells us that 90% of the time, there is someone which is incorporate ALL of these roles. Pick the person that is the Global Administrator and let's have a chat with this person and find out if anything special has been done to the Project Administration role. If this is the person that helped you reverting the situation as we talked before, even better. Discuss the situation with him/her. Share with him what you think caused the lock.

What About Licencing?

Often times Active Directory changes alone can fix lockout situations, in these cases a site collection admin does not require a dedicated Project Online license. The challenge here is sometimes to fix the issue, the person needs to log into Project Online and in this circumstance the site collection administrator needs a Project Online license. It’s possible that he or she already has one.

I Don't Have Licences Left. What Do I Do?

You can temporarily remove licences from an user and assign to other for this. The licences are not named licences, so that's a perfectly legal manoeuvre. Better yet, remove the license assigned to the locked out user since he/she is not able to use it anyway while you fix this.

Do you love to support the efforts to attract more women to #STEM ? Do you support a more diverse workplace, outside of your typical blue eyed, white man, in glasses and fancy suits?

Do yourself a favour and start using this great catalogue of stock photos representing women in technology, from diverse backgrounds and biotypes. I know some of these photos are full of Microsoft logos but a lot of them aren’t, so go ahead they are royalty FREEby WOCinTechChat! Bring new life to your presentations, support a more diverse culture in technology

If you work with Microsoft Project Online you know how great this product is at streamlining project, resource and portfolio management activities. All this is for a single purpose, to allow you to deliver better projects, on time, on budget.

And now a few changes were released this month. Let have a look at 2 very special ones that I would like you to know:

Why This is Good?

It offers a better scale, 30,000 projects allows for a much bigger room to move and improve and at the same time offer more flexibility to get more things done.

Pick and Choose the Site URL for your Project Site Configuration

Another great improvement on the way things are done in Project Online is on how information is organized in SharePoint sites. Now project managers can create more project sites and every project now can have a 1-1 relationship with their project site.

Why This is Good?

Again, traditionally this number was limited to 2,000. Often times more sites were needed but this limit was reached, then what people used to do was to split your landscape into several PWA sites, which then extended to another batch of 2,000 sites but the trade-off was that it impacted in the team productivity with a fragmented environment.

…One More Great News Before You Go…

In addition to these great improvements, there is one more fantastic improvement done in Project Online this month: Now users can set the destination URL of the project sites in the Enterprise Project Type template. This not only helps with the meta-hierarchical structure of the organization but also streamlines the process of project creation allocating sites based on similarities and functional equivalences.

How It Works?

For example, if you company has a site collection dedicated to a specific department and all sites are located on it (Sales, Marketing, IT etc), let’s call it https://superedge.sharepoint.com/sites/demo for demonstration purposes, now you can configure your all your departmental projects EPT to provision sitesdirectly into this site collection

You do this by going into each EPT, then in the Project Site section, select Allow users to choose:

What if You Can’t See these Things in Your Environment…

This is a Question that many times people ask me when they see these cool announcements and all the new features and yet they don’t seem to get them. Don’t worry, that’s the nature of Office 365 Releases. Releases are done by zones and via multiple channels. Very often these changes are done slowly and according to geographic zones, so if you don’t see them yet, don’t worry. They are coming!

‘’Sensei is the Japanese word generally associated with 'teacher'. In the Samurai culture, a sensei aim to be a samurai, and through continuous improvement a samurai is always a Sensei. Tokugawa Ieyasu, one of the greatest Samurai in history was not only an expert swordsmen but also a Zen practitioner. He believed that through Zen a state of no-mindedness was reached. Once in combat, he believed, an empty mind is free and has no need for doubt, fear, calculation. The actions are done automatically by the technique and pure focus. Keep that intro in mind, we will come back to it in a minute.

Looking at the project challenges as battles, it is important to have an empty mind in the Zen sense. We should let our pure focus and technique (developed and filtered by successful project experiences) should drive the outcomes.

Thus the importance of constant training, to sharpen the PMO skillset for battle, so then when we’re in the midst of a challenging project task we let all thinking go and let the purity of action to take over and move forward. A focused mind is the formidable tool against scope creep.

Now, back to the intro, Tokugawa Ieyasu practiced cutting bamboos hundreds of times a day, every day, to demonstrate to us, modern day warriors, that not only we are learning everyday but also that it requires a life-time of dedicated practice to achieve great swordsmanship. Become the Samurai warrior in your project you too as well.

What do you think? How has continuous training (of the lack of) shaped your professional role?